"The title Circuitous goes to the heart of Pandelis Karayorgis's creative process, the cycling back, the moving forward, the presence of patterns and the embrace of their opposite, the sense of the road less taken. You feel the pressure of origins, but also a sudden spinning outward, a looping toward new meanings. Karayorgis is a radical conservative, radical in the sense that he has looked with a special intensity at the roots of the music that he plays, conservative in that he maintains a relationship to what is most vital in the tradition. His music seems to proceed from a fundamental question, "How does one make meaningful work?"

Listening to Karayorgis's music, we hear a fundamental rethinking of modern jazz-bop--and its original impact. We're conditioned to listen to a conventional jazz performance through its mechanics, as a theme and set of variations, the theme often there only as something to be varied, the emphasis clearly on the soloist, that function enshrined in the chain that regularly concludes with a drum solo, the ultimate erasure of harmonic and melodic. But the great jazz composers and many of the great jazz bands clearly approached a work as something else, a gestalt, a work of interlocking parts, some fixed, some variable, some radically extensible, all liable to form new relationships and meanings. The work's total form had primacy over individual solos.

Listen to Thelonious Monk's early recordings and they were already great before he had great soloists and before the musicians had time to stretch out. Working with the limited palette of a small group and theme-and-variation patterns, Monk's music represented-even created-complex psychological states which have resonated ever since. The same is true of others in Monk's circle-Bud Powell, Elmo Hope, Herbie Nichols-and some outside, like Lennie Tristano and Hassan ibn Ali.

Pandelis Karayorgis develops the same thing here: in a brilliant revisioning of the modern jazz tradition, he constructs complex fields in which a listener is engaged in the play of puzzle, form and dialogue, and Karayorgis does it with an intensity and urgency that insist this is meaningful-even crucial--activity. [...]"-Stuart Broomer, from the liner notes